Microsoft Access 2010 Bible

Chapter 9: Presenting Data with Access Reports

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In Figure 9.11, the Description column has been resized to allow more room to show descriptions

without clipping. Resizing the Description column has pushed the other columns to the right, but

the report’s width accommodates these changes.

FIGURE 9.11

Layout view is useful for resizing controls in a columnar report.

Reference lines

Choosing a theme

After you adjust the layout, you can use controls in the Themes group on the ribbon’s Design tab

to change the report’s colors, fonts, and overall appearance. The Themes button opens a gallery

containing several dozen themes (see Figure 9.12).

Themes are an important concept in Access 2010. A theme sets the color scheme, selected font

face, font colors, and font sizes for Access 2010 forms and reports. As you hover the mouse over

the theme icons in the gallery, the report open in Layout view behind the gallery instantly changes

to show you how the report would look with the selected theme.

Each theme has a name, like Office, Apex, Flow, Paper, and Metro. Theme names are useful when

you want to refer to a particular theme in the application’s documentation or in an e-mail or other

correspondence. Themes are stored in a file with a .thmx extension, in the Program Files\

Microsoft Office\Document Themes 14 folder. Themes apply to all the Office 2010 docu-

ments (Word, Excel, and Access), making it easy to determine a style to apply to all of a company’s

Office output.